As most of us writers do, I’m always reading articles to improve my craft. There was one particular that has persistently stuck in the back of my mind when I think about this business called writing. Randall Silvis once said, “When was the last time you read something and thought, gee I didn’t know that about the human condition…for any reader with a few books under his belt and access to the nightly news, there is little in this world that can truly surprise us.”
While that statement may be true, as a writer with an over active imagination I feel that to take it to heart would be a sell out to my readers. How many times are we going to read the same ole story? When we pick up those books, aren’t we secretly hoping there will be something new inside those pages? Something a little different? Something that does bring back that child like wonder and make us rethink the world? Don’t we as writers owe it to our readers to raise the bar every time we put pen to paper? Stephanie Miller sucked us in not with just a love story but with a slightly different twist on the age old vampire and werewolf’s tale. We stood in line for Harry Potter because we’d never been in a world quite like that before. When I sit down to write Synarchy I want to pull back the veil on the world you think you live in and show it to you through a new set of eyes. I want to squeeze your heart, and hurt your brain, and make you ponder the real possibility of practical magic.
Fiction should engage our minds and our hearts. Sure, as readers we can be lazy. Sure, we pick up books to leave the real world behind. We read sometimes to be the hero we can’t be in the real world, to have that adventure we think we’ll never take in this lifetime. But, in all the fantastic worlds we’ve visited shouldn’t the most memorable leave us with some clue as to how to draw that very magic into our own lives?
We should never stop striving to change the world, to make it as we want to be; magical creations, beautiful reflections of our heartfelt, childlike desires. When our fiction no longer inspires us to keep dreaming, intending, creating, what are we reading it for? I say as writers, let’s keep trying to raise the bar. Our fans should expect nothing less.
----------
**Be sure to stop by tomorrow for my review of Synarchy Book 2: The Ascension and an interview with DCS (w/giveaway) on Wednesday!!**
0 comments:
Post a Comment
Questions, comments, and discussions are more than welcome! Thanks so much for visiting. 8)